The World God Only Knows Episode #04

After being dragged into dealing with real girls, Keima spends an episode focused on solving the problem of a girl in a buggy game.

What They Say:A short break from hunting down loose souls! Keima is finally free to toil away at his dating sims, but now there's a game that the "God of Conquest" cannot conquer...!? Keima begs (intimidates) Elsie into helping him conquer the buggy mess that everybody's talking about, "Crayon," the game with an ending nobody's ever seen. Elsie watches as Keima desperately tries to "save" the heroine Sora Asuka...

Content: (please note that content portions of a review may contain spoilers)With a couple of case of loose souls now behind him, Keima is getting into the routine fairly well though he's starting to get a bit run down on top of all of his game playing and the like. With the rich girl episode out of the way along with the athletic girl, it's time to move on o the artistic girl that he has to deal with. The approach for it is a bit different however as the girl he's dealing with, Sora, isn't actually a real girl but rather a girl in a game that he's desperate to win. With his reputation on the line for conquering games, having one he can't get through is pretty crushing to him psychologically.

What's made this game a real hardship though is that there's a bug in it that keeps you from being able to finish it. The really amusing part is that Keima should have known because the launch edition was hideously expensive with lots of extras that was meant to hide the problems. But a challenge is what Keima really enjoys in the end, though he may argue otherwise, and a buggy gave gives him a special challenge. And with Elsie in his life, he has a few additional options to work with in order to overcome it. Providing, of course, that the game even actually loads up on the system.

In a way, Keima's persistence is definitely an advantage for Elsie since it allows him to do the loose soul hunting so well. Once he gets his mind set on something, he doesn't give up. What sets this episode apart a bit is that because his focus is on the game this time as opposed to the loose soul, it has a very different vibe to it. Many parts of his playing of the game has us seeing it as if it's real, with him interacting with Sora inside the game and trying to figure out how to get past the buggy area. It has a lot of the same tenderness that we've seen in other instances of him dealing with girls, but you can see him feeling a bit more loose and free himself since it is just a game this time. Unfortunately, Elsie gets dragged into it a fair bit when he starts working down the options to try and get through by taking a different approach. Repeatedly.

In Summary:The mindset of someone like Keima is definitely interesting to watch, especially in comparison to many other male leads. While he wants nothing to do with real women, he's very intense about the things he is passionate about. Most others tend to have nothing that really separates them from the pack. The story here takes an interesting look at how someone can view a buggy game and their reasons for trying to get through it, as odd as it may seem to some. We all latch onto things that don't make sense to others and seeing that in Keima is both a positive thing and a warning. By giving us the games that Keima plays in a more realized form through his interactions with it, you can see more of who he really is and want to see more of that side come out. His single-minded focus is definitely a strength, but one that I think is shown with a real caution here.